United States:One billion people may die of tobacco-related illness this century, almost all of them in developing countries, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned as it rolled out an unprecedented global campaign to limit the spread of smoking.
The effort provides for the first time a comprehensive look at tobacco use, as well as smoking control and taxation policies, in 179 countries. It also lays out six strategies to reduce tobacco use, many used by rich countries in recent decades, although far from fully deployed even there.
Tobacco use is a risk factor for six of the world's eight leading causes of death and causes about one in every 10 deaths of adults now. That toll is expected to rise steeply as tobacco companies target new customers, particularly women, in low-income countries, WHO officials said at the campaign's launch in New York on Thursday.
"What we're saying is that we don't want to let that happen," said Douglas Bettcher, director of the WHO initiative. "We want to see the operating environment of the tobacco companies become as difficult as possible in the near future."
While WHO cannot force countries to make stringent tobacco control a priority, it hopes to convince them such efforts are cheap, proven and especially beneficial to their poorest citizens.
"In many countries, money spent by the poor on cigarettes is taken away from what they could spend on health and education," said Patrick Petit, an economist at WHO who helped produce the 329-page report accompanying the initiative's launch.
The six strategies are: monitoring tobacco use and control policy; protecting people by enforcing smoke-free laws; offering smokers nicotine replacement and counselling programmes; warning about smoking's hazards on cigarette packs; enforcing bans on tobacco advertising and promotion; and raising the price of tobacco through taxes.
Numerous studies have shown that raising the price of cigarettes is by far the most powerful strategy. For every 10 per cent increase in price, cigarette consumption overall drops about 4 per cent, and about 8 per cent in young people.
While some cities, states and provinces employ many of the strategies in a co-ordinated fashion, no countries do so on a national basis, the WHO report said. Uruguay, the world leader, does three - graphic pack warnings; universal smoke-free laws; and free smoking-cessation help.
Only 5 per cent of the global population is protected by smoke-free laws; only 5 per cent live in countries that completely ban tobacco advertising and event sponsorship; and only 6 per cent live in places where cigarette packs carry pictorial warnings of smoking's hazards.
In Greece 59 per cent of men smoke cigarettes every day; in Sweden 15 per cent do. Thirty-eight per cent of Serbian women smoke, but only 1 per cent of women in Kyrgyzstan. In Indonesia 65 per cent of men are smokers but only 4 per cent of women.
Almost two-thirds of the world's smokers live in 10 countries, with China accounting for nearly 3 out of every 10. About 100 million Chinese men now under 30 will die from tobacco use unless they quit, the report said.
The WHO's campaign was put together with financial help from a philanthropy run by Michael Bloomberg, billionaire businessman and New York City's mayor. He is giving $125 million over two years for global tobacco control.
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)